“The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled.― Paulo Freire

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The Middle: (1) Exploring Episode 2

In episode 1, the Game Whose Line is it? concentrates on the children. Learners got the idea of what each one of Frankie and Mike’s children is like. In the second episode, the first 2 minutes concentrates on Mike and Frankie. So, I decided to explore the following personality characteristics of Mike and Frankie, the straight shooters and cheerleaders type of people and hear what students had to say about it.

I have used this worksheet with 1 small group of four 9th graders so far (2 beginners, 1 in elementary level and another one in lower intermediate).

Played the extract once in L2. Subtitles in L1.

Define straight shooters in your own words: Ss broke the vocabulary in two parts and did not make any connection with what they had just watched. They came up with shooter (atirador) meaning someone who shoots and didn’t figure out the meaning of straight. They did try the dictionary for learners, but weren’t able to figure out on their own. But I totally believe they can if they watch attentively and look for the clues and a lot of practice doing it.

I handed out the worksheet and asked them to read the first part of it. Then, I asked again, and they continued clueless of what it means. This led me to pay attention to their literacy level and how they actually make sense of what they read or hear. And when I mean read, I don’t mean the ability to decode words, but to interpret it in a level that you are able to connect ideas & information, relate verbal to non-verbal, draw conclusions, find information to fill the gaps of what is not known, raise questions, think critically, make educated guess, etc. A series of things that takes the reading and listening to another level. This is also due to the fact that they are used to the one word translation process. So they don’t notice compound nouns. Earlier this year I tested this assumption with many students from lower to higher level by writing this on the board: Have a good time. Then, I asked them to tell me what it means in their own words and all they could do was to translate according to the words they had already stored, the word-by-word translation.

Then, I asked one student to read the first paragraph again for the group.After making them reading a few times and considering the sense groups, eventually someone noticed the sentence afterwards that explains the meaning of straight shooter and they started connecting it to the examples from the pictures and the scenes where Frankie remembered Mike being a straight shooter at best.

Brainstorming on the board. Now that they know that straight shooters are those who just say it like it is, they were able to define it according to their own words & ideas, and then think critically about it as you can see in the following Piktochart I just learned how to create. Time consuming, but fun!

In the second post I will share another objective I had in mind when I created this worksheet – the ability to fill the gaps and engaging with meaning when they hear or read something even if they don’t hear or understand everything.